Visual Studio 2005 SP1 Beta and Visual Studio support for Vista

Today, I’m pleased to announce the availability of the beta of Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1.

Based on your feedback, Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 addresses issues that were found through a combination of customer reports, MSDN Product Feedback Center and internal testing. I know that this Service Pack is a little late in coming. While I regret that it took longer, we wanted to be as thorough as possible about taking your feedback and decided to take the extra time. You can find a technical description of some of the fixes included in this service pack and download the beta by registering on the Microsoft Connect Site. We’ll have the complete list of fixes posted when the service pack releases. Pending feedback from you on this beta, our plan is to ship the final version in the next 3-4 months.

The second thing that I’d like to discuss is our support for Windows Vista, which is due to release in the coming months. Ensuring that VS2005 works well on Windows Vista is a core goal of ours. Visual Studio 2005 SP1 will run on Vista but will likely have a few compatibility issues. We are working with the Vista team to understand those, to provide workarounds where possible and also work on providing you with a set of fixes beyond SP1. We had a choice to make internally – hold up VS 2005 SP1 till we get the fixes in or decouple and ship VS 2005 SP1 as soon as possible knowing that we have to provide fixes for some of those Vista compatibility issues later. Based on your feedback of having SP1 for VS 2005 soon, we decided to separate the two. Visual Studio 2005, with its support for the .NET Framework 2.0 and add-ins to support the .NET Framework 3.0, Windows Vista, and the 2007 Microsoft Office system, provides a first-class development experience for developers.

As I’ve mentioned previously, Windows Vista will ship with the .NET Framework 3.0 pre-installed. We’re also testing to ensure that your .NET Framework 1.1 and 2.0 applications will work on Windows Vista so that your existing applications will continue to run as expected. However, we will not support Visual Studio .NET 2002 or Visual Studio .NET 2003 as development environments on Windows Vista. You can continue to use Visual Studio .NET 2002 or 2003 on Windows XP to develop applications that can run on Windows Vista. Given the customer feedback that we’ve received since the launch of Visual Studio 2005 indicating the manageability of upgrading from Visual Studio .NET 2003 to Visual Studio 2005, we are focusing our efforts on ensuring VS 2005 is a great development platform for Vista.

Previously we announced our support for ensuring the Visual Basic 6.0 runtime and IDE on Windows Vista and we are on track for delivering that support.

What sort of issues can we expect on vista? Are you flat out telling me I can’t start the IDE, or are you mearly suggesting that I’m gonna have some non-admin issues. I’ve not seen anything when running as non-admin on XP, nor have I seen any significant issues runnign VS2005 on Vista.

I am glad the sp1 is there, vs 2005 works under vista with no problems with a very large c# / web / windows forms solution, and I hope the sp1 improves the overall vs 2005 performance and ability to handle large solutions.

I’m just a little confused with the messaging here. Soma says that VS 2005 will work on Vista but will likely have compatibility issues and that the VS team are working with the Vista team to ‘understand’ those and to find work arounds.

Gee – Vista has been 5 years in the making, and VS has been around for a while. And just a few weeks before Vista should RTM these issues should be nailed. Or is Vista a surprise to the VS team (and vice versa).

My immediate take is that if VS is not going to work on Vista, how bad is the App Compat going to be.

I agree that the VS team should not be slipping to accomotate this. But Vista sure as heck should be able to support apps like VS – and if that means slipping Vista again, then so be it. Especiallly as VS 2002/2003 are not to be supported.

Posts like this make me even more nervous about Vista. While I’m sure it wasn’t Soma’s intention, it’s just more proof that corporates need to wait for SP1.

Seeing that the support for VS2003 will not be present on Vista is a bit worried for us. We’ve lots of large customers that works with .NET 1.1 applications and surely they will not be ready for a migration soon. In second, we work a lot on the Dynamics platform, and here .NET 1.1 is he standard.

Should we plan to have a machine with Vista and a machine with XP? Not so good… By doing this, you’ll see that XP will be the main platform for a lot of time.

I have to agree with Thoma’s comments above. Sorry I am going to be critical.

Somasegar, this just confuses people more and does not help at all. Why is that your flag ship dev product does not work well enough with your flag ship brand new OS? Were you taken by surprise?

So for those who work for in the industry, what are we supposed to say to our clients? Oh sorry, we cannot do anything on Vista right now since we don’t have a fully supported dev suite? So, why should we use either of the products? Hmmm ….

Also, not just stating VS.NET 2003 will not work, does not cut it. Is it a ploy to get people to upgrade to VS.NET 2005 (assuming it will work at some point)?

Dare I even ask about TFS and VSTS and Vista (given there are so many issues with it on XP). I suppose no hotfixes can be released to get this fixed?

It is too bad that we had to wait this long to get the product we should have had on the release date.

The bottom line is that VS2005 was not ready when it was released. Not even close. This has cost me countless hours of productivity. Let’s not even talk about my stress level. I’m on a project with a rigid release date and using VS2005 before SP1 was a huge mistake. This is based on various bugs I’ve experienced which have been mentioned in numerous newsgroups.

And now by not supporting 2003 on Vista, you force us to upgrade to this product?

Please learn from your mistakes here Microsoft; do not pack Orcas with features that will make you rush out another premature product. It should be more like SQL05, which runs flawlessly. More beta testing is an absolute must, with realistic test projects and solutions. If you repeat your mistakes we will all be learning Java soon because the developer market won’t put up with this.

I hope that this resolve some performance issues also, because the VS2005 is killing me in production environments with more than 50.000 lines of code =(

"Based on your feedback of having SP1 for VS 2005 soon, we decided to separate the two. Visual Studio 2005, with its support for the .NET Framework 2.0 and add-ins to support the .NET Framework 3.0, Windows Vista, and the 2007 Microsoft Office system, provides a first-class development experience for developers"

This show the names problems that you generate in the cummunity !!,

"and add-ins to support the .NET Framework 3.0, Windows Vista"

.NET 3.0 is the WinVista addons so don’t call it 3.0 but that is an old history that generates a lot of disappoint in the community and you know that.

Bad for that, I was loving the new MS way but now, I realize that the marketing is again here playing a very hard rol in the game. Because this time the others environments are evolving in the right way, while you are trying to sell things fast instead of focus on what you sell.

I love .NET 1.1, I love .NET 2.0, I love the future C# 3.0 but please stop doing new buggy versions or all the people that comes from the JAva world, will come back to it if .NET become buggy like now.

Just a real case, some time ago I release a program to a customer, and some days later he call me and said:

"Have you read the mails ?"

– What mails

"The mails from your program"

– But the program don’t send mails !!!

"time by time the program hangs up and show a pop up that saids:

The program do an ilegal operation

Send Report to Microsoft (button)

I cant belive it my program sending mails to MS.. this are problem in the framework right ???

One more thing: it feels like developer division – like the OS division before – felt victim of marketing hype surrounding .NET. Somehow you started to believe that using managed code will yield better software faster. During 6 years since .NET was wrapped off, we had the Longhorn fiasco, and now this. Since the 6.0 IDE will be supported, the only reason for lack of VS.Net 2003 support is the fact that it contains managed components.

The first thing you folks on Visual Studio 2005 team can do is release SP1 that is NOT beta. Next you can start working on SP2 (to be released in 3-4 months) that will work with Vista.

It is a complete joke when you just released SP1 for VS2003, then you announce .NET 3.0 and now you tell us VS2003 won’t work with Vista.

Most of us VS2005 supporters are still waiting to simply compile large projects. Web Site Projects (WSP) and Web Application Projects (WAP) are just other examples of incompetence when all you have to do is listen to Visual Studio developers.

Thanks for the trivial effort to release SP1 beta. If you want to win the next election you had better get your act together soon. Java is written all over this fiasco of versions.

I really think this is quite unacceptable for a software giant like Microsoft. I truly understand Microsoft’s point about Vista’s features – Aero, UAC, etc… but not having backward-compatibility for developers is akin to Java’s long-standing incompatibility between their JDK versions.

1. Visual Studio .NET 2003 is a product that was out 2+ years ago. Many of our customers, partners and vendors still rely on it. Not supporting VS 2003 and/or .NET 1.1 is harshly forcing everyone to upgrade to 2005 version. Many IT Departments and CTOs are unable to justify the upgrade in such a short span of time.

2. Visual Studio .NET 2003, being such a relatively new release is still under the full support cycle which means Microsoft should honour its commitment to the future of the technology. While having an "ideal case" would be good where everyone is on Vista, running with Aero support, having UAC control, etc… this is not the case in real world.

Interscape, so what actually makes VB6 (released in 1998) run on Vista, while VS2003 is left behind?

To Microsoft: maybe you should stop worrying about Orcas and next releases, because your installed base is going to shrink significantly if you don’t support previous IDEs on Vista. Given your recent history, fluff like "we’re going to focus on delivering great experience with [insert codename here]" doesn’t cut it anymore.

I’m sorry; this is completely and totally unacceptable. If you’re telling me that a major fundamental Microsoft product slated to be released in a matter of months can’t execute other fundamental Microsoft products then you have a serious, serious problem.

If it is to be the case then Vista shouldn’t be delayed; it should be scrapped entirely. Honestly, way too much time was taken and the product is beyond underwhelming. If on top of that it is incapable of running first-party applications which are still well within their product support lifecycle then the OS is totally useless and will shape up to be the next Windows Millennium Edition, and if you don’t understand how much of an insult that is intended to be then you have a serious disconnect from reality. Moreso, what does that mean for third-party applications?

Microsoft products, which I generally prefer, are popular for two reasons: general support for a wide array of current and legacy software, and wide support for the development community. In one fell swoop Microsoft is proposing to stop both. This is a lose/lose situation for all of those who are involved.

And no, I’m not some anti-Microsoft zealot. I do not have an account on Slashdot. I am writing this on my primary development machine which has four different versions of Visual Studio installed on it simultaneously. I am surrounded by five machines all running Windows exclusively. My many cases of DVDs for my MSDN Team Edition for Software Developers are sitting in the bookshelf behind me. I am an operator on several IRC channels on the Eris Free Network related to Microsoft technologies. I am an apologist in every sense of the word and openly defend Microsoft even in the most ridiculous of circumstances. But these actions are indefensible and actively threaten my livelihood, which is currently dependent on the ability of my company to develop and support our products based on Microsoft platforms dating back to the ancient and unsupportable times of the late 1990s.

I implore you to take these issues into deep consideration and to share my rant with all those who have the slightest amount of influence. The success of a great many companies rests on the Microsoft platform. Instability of the offerings of that platform is not an option.

P.S. I’d just like to add that it is my opinion that if Visual Studio 2005 requires a service pack and the previous versions of Visual Studio become unsupported then it is an egregious failing on the part of the Operating Systems division at Microsoft. There is absolutely no reason that the new operating system cannot support all previous applications save those which rely on explicitly insecure legacy, and if recent Microsoft products also fit into that category then we have an even bigger problem than I had originally thought.

So to all critics abov, I’d like to mention, that I don’t agree with you. The only reason for me using VS 2003 is if you have old projects and you don’t want to migrate them to VS 2005 (which you should consider). For every other case I can’t understand anybody still using VS 2003, VS 2005 is so much more productive.

And who forces you to use vista? If you use a old Development envirionment why not using XP for a while? I plan to continue using Xp on my production machine for the next vew month even I use VS 2005.

We provide compiled binaries for use with different versions of Visual Studio (I have VC6, VS 2003, VS 2005, eVC3 and eVC4 installed). As long as our customers do not migrate to bug-ridden VS 2005, switching is not an option (and I hate to tell you that VS 2005 adoption rate among them is rather low).

Nobody forces us to use Vista, and as a matter of fact we won’t use it as long as MS doesn’t provide support for IDEs (which probably means never.)

The Good News is that we have Service Pack 1 for Visual Studio available in Beta (so you are on your own with that :&gt;). The bad news is that Visual Studio 2005 will only work, and then with specific problems. Somasegar expalins this a little bit

Upgrading a project to a different development environment and different compilers is an extensive and _expensive_ process requiring full revalidation of all software. We are (primarily) a contract development company, with six developers. We give fixed-price quotes to our customers, and you can believe that they will either postpone or cancel the work, or find a different contractor, if the quote is inflated by having to change tools. It’s a case of reducing the risk.

Windows Vista will be released later this year to partners and volume license customers and in the beginning of 2007 to the masses. A successful release of a software product such as Windows Vista req…

The announcement of the beta of SP1 for Vista on somasegar’s blog here seems to have caused some consternation since they’re saying they need a new service pack for Vista and VS2003 won’t be supported.The truth is a bit more mixed than that as Scott Guth

We port a big project of more than 250.000 lines of code and the program become very unstable, and i don’t talk about VS, the framework generates random errors and show a pop up to send errors to MS !!!

we are NOT MORE PRODUCTIVE WITH VS2005

WE ARE MORE PRODUCTIVE WITH VS2005

The reason: VS2005 hang ups all the time for us we are working with a big VB.NET application, with a lot of inherited forms and they don’t work very well, you can see it in the kb.

The edit and continue simply don’t work for us !!!

do you call it more productive ???

I love .NET 1.1 I love even more .NET 2.0, but is very hard to me to see how MS is taking this problem, releasing a SP one year later, asking us to call to the support to get more than 20 hot fixes !!!

They preffer to think in the very bad new name for the WinFx and things like that !!

I was a big Microsoft fun !! I fight with friend to defend the M$ position, but this is too much for me !! they simple seams to don’t here any more !!!

They only hear us while they want the all the delphi and Java people jump into the .NET world !!

But now they only see to the future and worry about us, they said:

Wait to the the Q3 2006 we send all our all people to the WinVista team, and we can release the SP before !!!

PLease Bill no go for the MS, give all your employers a lesson of customer care and satisfaction

Simply put, this will have a pretty serious chilling effect concerning the adoption of Vista for my team and our customers. It is disturbing to hear this degree of uncertianty concerning the ability of 2.0-based applications to run successfully and without issue on Vista. Now we either freeze our customers and their OS pruchases on XP or must plan for the possibility of patch releases merely to support the new OS. Very disapointing.

It also is a circumstance that is very difficult to reconcile with the Allchin letter you referenced in your 9/15 post. Mr. Allchin’s statement that "You have GOT to be ready for this opportunity" sounds like it is being followed by a MIcrosoft parenthetical that reads "because we certainly are not."

I can’t believe it’s going to take 3-4 months to release VS2005 SP1. That just seems absolutely absurd to me, especially after waiting for so long to have some of these VS2005 annoyances resolved.

Listen, Somasegar, I mean no disrespect, but something has to change here. MS must get into a position where it can release service packs to Visual Studio within a reasonable amount of time; take smaller bites if you need to. It’s difficult for me to believe that Microsoft, of all companies, cannot accelerate this time frame.

And like the others, I think the decision not to support VS2003 on Vista is a big mistake. But then I thought that calling WinFX ".NET 3.0" was a mistake, too.

Scrap Vista and start over! You guys at Microsoft have surely jumped the shark on Vista. I’m shortly celebrating the 5th anniversary of the release of the public Vista bits without a release. If I were in your position at my job, I surely would have been fired already.

And now the announcement that VS.NET 2003 SP1 will not run on Vista?!? You’ve got to be kidding! (Checking calendar — Nope not April 1st…)

So after years of telling clients to upgrade their VB6 apps to .net I’ve now got to tell them that if they want to maintain their .net 1.1 apps on Vista, they’ve got to upgrade them to .net 2? (With a new, more expensive version of VS which doesn’t work right on Vista yet).

Or, they could just dig out the old VB6 source code, because that’s supported…

“Given the customer feedback that we’ve received since the launch of Visual Studio 2005 indicating the manageability of upgrading from Visual Studio .NET 2003 to Visual Studio 2005, we are focusing our efforts on ensuring VS 2005 is a great development platform for Vista.”

Having been through a mid size windows forms (170K lines of code) upgrade from vs2003 to vs2005 and experienced the significant pain that migration caused us. Once your solution grows beyond a certain size the IDE slows down to a crawl on a high end Laptop that was a 5 months old. Dare I say it, but VS2005 and Vista in combination would require significant CPU/RAM to allow a developer to operate productively. If you really want pain, try working in a mixed DPI scenario, 120 vs 96 dpi and see how to cause a development team tears every day at code checkin/out.

Our companies experience migrating VS2003 web applications to VS2005 was a total re-write to help incorporate master forms. Oh and the fact I got totally lost on where the files in a VS2005 project actually reside.

Finally, all I can say is that we have been burnt in the past with Microsoft and upgrades, so this stands as nothing new for me. Stay away from version 1 or 2 products from Microsoft because it generally takes them a few versions to iron out all the problems, mainly at our (developers/customers) expense.

I appreciate the amount of feedback on this topic and want to provide a little bit more background on why we made some of the decisions that we did.

Development tools as a whole have requirements that are not a part of normal applications. Some of the things developer tools expect to do are also the types of things that malicious code tries to perform on a user machine. As you all know, the Windows team has continued to make great progress w/Vista on the security front. There are a number of new security related work and features that are a part of Windows Vista. In the case of Visual Studio, things like debugging while attaching to a process requires reading and modifying that process’ memory, or registering a COM component directly conflict with the principles behind some of the new security features in Windows Vista.

I’ve also clearly heard the concern around our decision not to support VS.NET 2003. We know from talking to customers that some of them have been successful in using VS.NET 2003 and VS2005 on Windows Vista when running as an administrator on the machine. However, there are some scenarios, like those I described above, that will not work. Going forward, we will provide more details on what these issues are and any known workarounds that you can use. Also, when we have fixes to workaround some of these problems, we will make them available.

One other thing that I want to reiterate is that existing and future .NET Framework 1.1 and 2.0 applications will continue to work on Windows Vista.

For those people with performance problems in VS 2005, we’d like to help. If you can, please start by downloading SP1. We’ve fixed a number of performance problems, and we’d like to know if we’ve fixed your problem.

If you’re still having performance problems with VS 2005, please drop me a note at DevPerf@Microsoft.com. Let me know about how big your solution is (# projects, # files, size of files), and what language and type of applications you’re developing. Most importantly, if you can give me specific steps to reproduce the problem, and quantify how bad it is, that would be a great help.

I understand that old development tools have troubles integration with the new security model of Vista, and I also understand that it would be a major effort to adapt and test the VS.NET 2003 code to support it.

However, given the investments Microsoft partners have made into .NET 1.1, and given Microsofts commitment via its product life cycle, I really think MS should take the pain and provide a service pack of VS.NET 2003 at least that runs on Vista.

A better alternative event would be to provide a VS 2005 service pack that can target .NET 1.1 too. The tight coupling of VS and .NET versions is a pain anyway, and it’s a problem that more componentized environments don’t have. I bet a lot of people would love that feature, and given the pressure that not supporting VS.NET 2003 creates, this might just be the time to justify this investment. After all, developers are probably the last people on earth MS would want to not migrate to Vista, right?

"Visual Studio 2005 SP1 will run on Vista but will likely have a few compatibility issues. We are working with the Vista team to understand those"

1. So Vista’s been in development for over 5 years and a few weeks before RTM you’re working with the OS team to "understand" the compatability issues??

"Given the customer feedback that we’ve received since the launch of Visual Studio 2005 indicating the manageability of upgrading from Visual Studio .NET 2003 to Visual Studio 2005, we are focusing our efforts on ensuring VS 2005 is a great development platform for Vista."

2. And didn’t anyone at MS notice that the lack of support for VS2003 may upset a significant number of your developer/customers? Did you actually solicit any feedback from customers regarding this issue? One has to always wonder where are you getting that "customer feedback" that you always claim to be driving your decisions.

Relax guys – the sky is ‘not’ falling…I haven’t read all of the comments, so I appologize if someone has explained this already – but…

Vista has that niffty (or not so niffty) feature called UAC – User Access Control. Remember, Windows is targeted at the masses; and UAC is going to help people like my Mom avoid ‘bad’ software/spyware/malware/whateverware.

If you are the kind of person that knows what Visual Studio is, you are most likely not the kind of person who will benefit from UAC. In fact, every developer I’ve talked to about Vista agrees that the first thing you should do after installing Vista is disable UAC.

The ServerSide.NET reports a worrying story that has started late last week, but caught my attention earlier this morning. The route of the article stems from this blog, as filed by a Microsoft VP annoucning that almost a year after…

somasegar’s post from friday 11:03 makes that all sound not quite as straightforward. VS 2003 and 2005 might have worked for _you_ with UAC disabled. but you might experience additional problems once you use certain features. if MS came out with a statement that says everything was tested and works fine with UAC disabled, i’d agree with you, but that hasn’t happened so far.

Huh? What’s this? You’ll support VB 6.0 on Vista (even the IDE) and VS2005 but not VS2003? How does that happen? I thought .NET was exactly about shielding the developper away from the hassles of directly using Win32 by introducing a virtual machine? Doesn’t .NET 1.1 run un Visa or why won’t VS2003 work there? Or is it simply: It may work, but if it doesn’t don’t bother to contact our support, because we’d ignore these issues anyway?

Some VS2003 user: VS is primarily unmanaged code, and a lot of that code is very low-level. others have explained this here, and somasegar himself has pointed out repeatedly that there are no problems with the .net runtime on vista in any version.

Okay, VS may indeed be unmanaged code, but one thing is really better with the Borland brand of products: you can compily ANY code from previous versions with the latest without much hassle if you don’t use 3rd party addons or if you have the correct verisions of them.

As it seems VS2005 can’t do .NET V1.1 applications anymore? Am I right? If yes, why? Why always forcing the developper to upgrade? It seems several billion dollars profit every year is not enough… (at least for some)

I have tried to wait and calm down before writing a comment on this, but I have to realise I will not calm down on this issue. I must say that MS has made a very bad decision here. Vista is so late, several of the main features has been removed still there won’t be a .NET develoment environment that work without problems on it (as I understand not even 2005 with SP1 will work without problems). I don’t know which studio version that is most common today, but most of those I talk to still do most of the work with VS 2003. VS 2005 is only used if is really necesary to develop for .NET 2.0, otherwise many prefer 1.1 (or actually VS 2003).

Somaseger says several times that .NET 1.1 applications will run on Vista. I assume that he never installed .NET 1.1 on Vista. Since it for some reason that I don’t understand the 1.1 framework is not included in Vista. When installing it you get a warning about compatibility issues. So from my point of view I can not say to my customers that my 1.1 applications work on Vista since I can not accept that my customers should see the installation warnings/errors that currently exist when installing .NET 1.1 framwork on Vista.

I like VS 2005 (even though it has some performance problems) and I love C++/CLI very much. All my new projects target this development platform.

But on the other side, there is a past. I have to maintain even (machine control) applications that still run on DOS and Windows 3.1. Therefore I have a lot of different compilers installed (copied) on my primary development machine. The majority of code I have to support uses VS2002. But there is also a significant amount of code that requires Borland C++ V4.5 (more than 100 machines run software produced with this compiler). So far there was never a problem compiling under NT/Win2K/XP all this ancient software. I hope, that this will also be true for Vista (with UAC turned off and working as an administrator). Otherwise Vista is not an operating system for developers.

This seems to be the new rule for Microsoft and not the exception. When SQL 2005 and VS 2005 came out, Microsoft *refused* to support either with Commerce Server 2002, even though that was the latest RTM version of Commerce Server at the time. Now they are releasing a new Windows version and not supporting anything except a beta, hopefully be released, version of a SP for one of the latest development environments, and, if I noticed correctly, I get a warning about installing SQL 2005 on vista and it needing SP2 for SQL 2005…and I believe SP1 just recently came out.

What happened to the old policy? Support policies were current version and 2 back. I understand they cant support everything, but it is a shame they are bowing to the mid 1990s stuck in time developers running Visual Studio 6, which is *clearly* out of the support cycle and are refusing to support VS 2003. What the hell is wrong with this place? Is this what we have expect going forward? With the new pricing structure of MSDN, it is a heck of a price to pay to get a VS IDE that is only supported for 2 years.

Today, I’m pleased to announce the availability of the beta of Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1. Based on your feedback, Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 addresses issues that were found through a combination of customer reports, MSDN Product Feedbac